"They're having to look at themselves and do some soul-searching and say what they're going to do better when they get out," he says.
Groom, who has approved other parenting programs at various units, reacts more cautiously, saying No More Victims is still under evaluation. If the program receives high marks, it could expand to other segments of the prison population and to other units. But TDCJ does not provide funding to volunteer groups, and the program would have to find its own way to pay for its growth.
Deron Neblett
Crying time again: Marilyn Gambrell, founder of No More Victims, teaches classes to inmates and high school students.
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Groom plans to review Gambrell's curriculum and interview offenders. Meanwhile, she has many concerns: How does the class work with inmates who have older children? What if an inmate, after hearing the teens speak, thinks his kids hate him and feels he doesn't have a chance? Does the program improve inmate behavior before release?
But James Maxwell knows it works for certain.
"If you're in a room with Ms. Marilyn Gambrell, and if you have children, and if you don't feel what she's putting down, then there's something wrong with you."
In the second row, an inmate stood up. Though he was of average height, he stood tall and held his hands in front of him, as if he were appearing respectfully before a judge. He pleaded, though, not with a robed figure but with five high school students. Please, he asked them, how should he approach his kids?
"I don't want to say something to push them away," he said.
The Smiley students gave mixed messages. They hated their daddies, yet they loved them too. Kids give you certain chances, they said. Eighteen-year-old Gregory Fransaw approached the microphone and said, "You pointing your fingers at each other's not going to solve anything."
Earlier in the evening, during dinner at the Golden Corral, Gregory, in the midst of a plate-by-plate eating contest with Antonio Bass, had remarked, "I'm going to put my daddy's face on all of [the inmates] and just tell them."
And he did. He stood at the podium and damned his father for disappearing for six years. When his father fell ill, he said, he didn't even visit him in the hospital. He played basketball instead.
Now, though, he seemed to feel sorry for the prisoners, these fathers who had never been dads and now asked for his advice. He told the man to write his children, to let them know he cared. And when he got out, to not boss them around. You have no right to do that when you haven't been home, Gregory said.
Then James Tillis took his turn. He rose from the field of white jumpsuits and announced that he had three children, ages 23, 20 and 17. Two boys and a girl. He had separated from their mother for eight years, and she passed away right before his current incarceration. One of his boys, Philip, was "a special child," he said pointing to his head. And his daughter, Jennifer, attended Smiley. Now, although Jennifer had written, he didn't know where she was.
Five hands shot up in the air.
"Mr. Tillis, we know Jennifer. She was in our class," Reagan said. "We were called twins at school." But then Jennifer left school.
"Jennifer never talked down on you, but she wanted you to be there. She never talk down on her daddy," Reagan said.
Dorothy Galloway came to the podium and said she and Jennifer used to do each other's hair and take Philip to the movies.
"She was always Daddy this and Daddy that. Don't think that we don't care." Gregory said he played basketball with his sons, both of them.
Hearing all of this, Tillis folded his hands, palm to palm, as if in prayer, under his chin and softly cried. Teary-eyed students hugged each other. Gambrell, of course, dabbed her eyes, and visitors in the back rows passed tissue around.
After the event, Gambrell and the students milled around outside under the incandescent glow of parking lot lights. Reagan stood tall, a windbreaker hanging as loosely on her as it would from a clothesline.
"I wished my daddy would get locked up again and have to go to Kegans State Jail," she said. "He would be a better daddy if he did his time there."
